From boardrooms to turbines — What I wish I’d known before leaving private practice for an in-house role

Jennifer Malcolm, vice-convener of the Society’s In-house Lawyers Committee, reflects on a career in-house.

When I made the decision to move into an in-house role after a whopping 16 years working in private practice, it felt like a leap into the unknown. Would I enjoy it? Would I have the skills and the mindset to succeed? Would it be worth it? The answer to all three: a resounding ‘yes’.

From boardrooms to turbines: a career recharged

What surprised me the most? How much fun it would be. I love the renewable energy sector – it’s fast-moving, innovative, diverse and most of all, united by a shared passion to fight climate change. In my role I have the opportunity to work on all our offshore wind development activities globally. That has allowed me to work on projects in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Australia, Korea and more.

The work is varied, global and exhilarating. One day I’m deep in mergers and acquisitions or joint ventures, the next I’m helping to craft our application for a government auction or plan greenfield development where we develop projects from scratch. At the same time, I’m reviewing patent applications for new floating wind technology.

Day to day, I work with a close-knit group of colleagues – based across Europe and Asia-Pacific – from our development, technical and commercial team. They are passionate about what we do, committed and lots of fun!

Learning to learn again

One of the biggest shifts? I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much I’ve learned and how much I enjoy learning new skills. Looking back, it could feel humbling at times to accept how much there was to learn. When you’re confident in your private practice role and then suddenly feel like you are moving into a new trainee seat, you quickly realise that you need to embrace the reality of upskilling yourself. I firmly believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t growing.

Before moving in-house, I wish I could have grasped the extent to which my role would enable me to learn new legal skills and sharpen my business acumen. Being in-house has also helped me to realise that the ‘legal’ piece is often one piece of a much bigger pie and that there are so many other elements that go into completing a project.

Without a doubt, the skills I’ve learned have made me a more rounded lawyer. Reflecting on what I’ve learned, I now believe that all private practice lawyers should spend time in-house: it sharpens your advice and makes you a more rounded professional.

Beyond the legal brief

Another surprise is how much I would get involved with non-legal matters and how much I would enjoy learning about and contributing to those issues.

In my role I’ve weighed in on commercial discussions on new projects, contributed to strategic discussions on new markets, reviewed budgets, assessed engineering challenges, helped to set up a new office for one of our joint ventures and secured sponsorship licences for foreign hires. It’s hands-on, high-impact work.

Living with your advice

In-house the stakes feel different. I wish I could have understood just how rewarding it feels to have a tangible link between your work and the effect of your work.

Being in-house definitely makes me think more deeply about the work. A huge reason for that is that I need to live with the consequences of getting something wrong. In private practice, there will always be a distance between your legal advice and its impact. In the in-house world, it’s the opposite. That shareholders’ agreement you drafted? A private practice lawyer might draft it, then put it in a (virtual) filing cabinet. But I need to live with that shareholders’ agreement on a day-to-day basis. Advice needs to be practical, workable and built for the real world.

There is also a wonderfully tangible element for me when I think about actually delivering a multi-billion-pound infrastructure offshore wind project. The scale of offshore wind is staggering – everything is bigger, more expensive, much more challenging due working many miles off the coast but, crucially, the industry has the opportunity to deliver governments’ net zero targets.

To put an offshore wind farm in context, the projects we are developing now – which will be delivered at the end of the decade and into the 2030s – will involve fabricating and installing anywhere between 60-100 wind turbines, each about the same size as the Eiffel Tower, in water of depths of up to 100 metres. Even after working for the sector for years, that still blows my mind!

Final word: get stuck in

And lastly, if you’re thinking of moving in-house, a piece of advice that has always resonated with me, given by the late Kirk Murdoch of McGrigors/Pinsent Masons at my trainee induction: “You get out of it what you put into it.”

I’ve always taken that to mean you need to grab all opportunities that come your way. Get stuck in. Make the most of things. Say yes to new challenges. Throw yourself in. If you do that, you’ll learn more than you imagined and have a lot of fun along the way.

Jennifer Malcolm is Head of Legal, Offshore Wind at BayWa r.e., and vice-convener of the Law Society of Scotland’s In-house Lawyers Committee.